The use of electronic medical records offers many advantages to both patients and practitioners. Files may be maintained on a network, allowing easy access to patient histories, studies, analyses, and other records. These files may be maintained in a digital format that is easy to transmit or share among medical professionals, reducing the need for redundant or repeat studies and diagnoses. Patients that wish to obtain a second opinion or change doctors no longer need to arrange for the transportation of physical files, and medical providers may see dramatic benefits in administrative overhead tasks such as faxing, photocopying, or mailing documents.
However, these electronic medical records are often provided in a raw “data dump” format. Although some filing systems provide the ability to tag or annotate documents, a practitioner may still be confronted with dozens or hundreds of individual documents, of which only a few may be relevant to a particular task. While an internist or family doctor may have a need to be familiar with the patient's entire medical history, patients often receive referrals to specialists for particular systems or diagnoses. The referral to the specialist or prescription for a study may only include a very brief description of the patient and the symptoms (e.g., age, gender, type of study ordered, general indications), without providing insight to possibly relevant elements of the patient's medical records.
Although the patient's medical records may include additional data that is relevant to the specialist, the sheer amount of available data may result in a low “signal to noise” ratio of relevant data to irrelevant data. It is rarely an efficient use of the specialist's time to comb through the patient's entire medical history to identify such pertinent information. In the particular case of medical imaging, radiologists are trained to analyze data in a visual manner using specialized equipment, and it is impractical and inefficient to step away from an imaging device to access the text-based records via a separate application.